Photojournalist Martha Cooper has always been fearless, indefatigable, and intuitive. Now in her 80s, she is best known for her documentation of New York City’s graffiti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and, specifically, the 1984 book she co-authored, Subway Art, which became a foundational text for street art globally.

Twenty years ago, casting about for a project, she came home to Baltimore. She knew the city well. Growing up, she had been influenced by her father, who ran Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road with his brother, and her mother, a Western High School English and journalism teacher. Initially, she considered the rowhouse communities of East Baltimore for her project, partly because she was taken with screen painting. (With degrees in art and anthropology, documenting subgroups has been a lifelong interest.)

Her cousin Sally, however, suggested the neighborhood where their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, rabbi Benjamin Szold, settled after emigrating from Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. In her ancestors’ once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Southwest Baltimore—aka Sowebo—she found inspiration in children jumping up and down on a discarded mattress and kids kicking around a tin can on the streets of the struggling community.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, that’s the kind of place I’m looking for,’” recalls Cooper before a recent showing of some of that work from 2006-2016 at Zella’s Pizzeria on Hollins Street. “I didn’t spend much time looking elsewhere and then I went to this real estate agent who showed me [former City Paper photographer] John Ellsberry’s tiny little rowhouse on South Carrollton Avenue, which he had renovated nicely. I’m like, ‘Great. I’m going to buy this house and I’m going to do this project.’”

She introduced herself and her intentions at the annual Sowebo Arts & Musical Festival by offering free portraits in front of a public mural painted by artist Adam Stab (see above). And soon she began carrying her camera everywhere.

The working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood surrounding historic Hollins Market has been targeted by real estate speculators for decades. But gentrification has yet to take a firm hold. Cooper notes she never had an incident in her years prowling for pictures, but she did lose money when she resold her home.

Baltimore author and Hollins Market resident Baynard Woods curated the new exhibition at Zella’s, titled “Sowebo Streets,” which also includes neighborhood portraits from an array of local photographers like Shae McCoy, Wendel Patrick, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and Woods.

“I live down the street and get my packages delivered here, everyone does,” Woods says. The exhibition closes April 30. (Hopes to bring the show to this year’s Sowebo Art and Music Festival in late May did not pan out.) “Zella’s owners are great. They’re immigrants. I wanted to do it for the neighborhood.”

It’s a show in a pizzeria and not Paris, which someone else of her stature might dismiss, but not Cooper, adds Woods. “Martha? Right away, she said, ‘Yes.’”

Cooper is also the subject of the 2019 award-winning documentary Martha: A Picture Story, which is available to stream and includes her Sowebo experience and work.

“It was hard to describe immediately, but I what I was getting was pictures of everyday life in the streets,” Cooper says. “Simple things. Card playing. There was graffiti, a skate park, and an arabbers’ stable in the neighborhood, which was always good to photograph. Somebody kept pigeons and pigeon flying has been another interest.

“I also have a bunch of sidewalk pool scenes, one with a big inflatable sliding board in a tight alley,” she adds with a contagious smile. “I mean, I could do a whole zine of sidewalk pools.”

After a 2012 artist residency in South Africa, Cooper paired some Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in the Soweto township, one of the centers of the anti-apartheid movement. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features almost interchangeable images of cookouts, storefronts, children playing, rolling tires down the street, beat-up cars—even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts.

“There is a picture that I never thought was particularly anything, Baltimore kids riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it was in this small show I had in Johannesburg,” Cooper recalls. “And that was the picture people commented on because they were so surprised that white people would ride in the back of a pickup truck.

“To me, it was just two [similar] pictures. But a friend overheard those comments from the groups of Black South Africans standing around and talking about the photos. It was just the similarities of everyday life. But maybe when you put those two photos together, you find something universal. People overcoming their circumstances.”

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Martha Cooper adjusts the strap of the black camera bag around her neck as she comes upon a concrete Jersey wall at the end of a desolate South Baltimore street. She looks left, then right. Most people, at this juncture, might retreat to more familiar terrain, but Cooper presses on, navigating around the barrier and continuing along a trash-strewn path. A pair of stacked highway overpasses loom in the distance. “This is the way,” she says, in a tone of voice Lewis and Clark might recognize.

Dressed in a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, the 75-year-old Cooper is as unpretentious as she is intrepid. A steady gaze and impish smile enhance her disarming presence. She is the cool aunt whose twinkling eyes say she’s seen things you wouldn’t believe, and she’s determined to share them.

Cooper has a knack for finding and photographing these untamed, vibrant places.

She traces that sort of freedom and empowerment to her maternal grandmother, Henrietta Szold, a prominent Jewish-American Zionist. Szold’s father was the rabbi at Temple Oleb Shalom in Southwest Baltimore, and she relentlessly advocated for a Jewish state and lived most of her life in Jerusalem. Szold, who passed away in 1945, had a school and research institute named after her, was inducted into the American Women’s Hall of Fame, and even appeared on Israeli postage stamps and currency. “I come from a feminist family,” says Cooper. “It’s a line of strong, independent women.”

Cooper graduated early from Forest Park High School at the age of 16. She also graduated early from Iowa’s Grinnell College, earning an art degree in just three years, and then headed to Thailand with the Peace Corps. There, she developed a keen interest in anthropology and an appreciation of the Thai hill tribes’ culture, especially their ornate embroidery and wax-resist dyed fabrics. Figuring she could parlay that into a career in museum work, Cooper earned a degree in ethnology from Oxford University, returned to the U.S., and got a job cataloguing artifacts at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.

She quickly grew bored, realizing that the artifacts didn’t interest her and working in a museum was too far removed from the action. She wanted to be out in the field. She’d been taking photographs since getting her first camera, a Brownie, from her father when she was just 3, and she had also enjoyed an independent photo project at Grinnell, so she took her camera and got to work.

After interning at National Geographic, she turned to newspaper photography, starting at The Narragansett Times in Rhode Island before landing a staff photographer position at the New York Post. The Post job piqued her anthropological interest as she explored the far reaches of New York City and met and photographed all sorts of people.

A photo essay she produced for the Post in the late 1970s (included in her book Street Play) changed the direction of her career. The piece was about “kids being creative,” she says. “All the kids in those pictures were making things and doing things.”

She scrolls through a few old images she has stored on her iPhone: children playing in water gushing from a fireplug, girls practicing dance moves, a group of teenagers making go-carts, and a boy with a pigeon. That boy, she says, introduced her to Dondi White, the first graffiti artist she ever met: “When Dondi explained graffiti to me, I was back in museum mode, back in ethnic art mode. Also, it was a super underground movement at the time, which was one of the reasons I was attracted to it. I felt as if I had been let in on a secret.”

Cooper shadowed Dondi and other early graffiti artists around train yards, on subway cars, and in the streets to shoot the burgeoning scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She documented that golden age of New York graffiti in Subway Art, her 1984 book with photographer/filmmaker Henry Chalfant, which went on to sell half a million copies and was dubbed “the [graffiti] movement’s Bible” by The New York Times. It established Cooper as graffiti’s foremost photographer and led the likes of Time magazine to declare, “Martha Cooper introduced street art photography to the world.”

It was a blessing and a curse. “I don’t want to be known as just a graffiti photographer,” she says. “It’s limiting and not really what I do.”

Cooper points out that she has always been interested in the culture framing the art as well. “One of the things I learned at Oxford is that you can’t just look at the art,” she says. “It has to have context. My pictures are the ones with context. To this day, I don’t want to simply take pictures of walls. To me, that’s boring. Anybody can do that. I’m trying to get the walls and some other thing. I like to see the process of people painting walls, how they do it, or I like to get some sense of community around the wall.”

Indeed, Cooper’s strongest work focuses on community, especially overlooked subcultures in urban areas. She has extensively photographed sidewalk shrines, Japanese tattoos, Haitian Vodou, Brazilian trash collectors called catadores, Chinese Lion dancing, and Puerto Rican casitas (“little houses”).

She has been obsessively shooting Sowebo since the mid-2000s. At the time, she’d inherited a little money and wanted to use the funds for a street photography project she wouldn’t otherwise get to do. She considered various spots around the world but was intrigued by returning to Baltimore, to a neighborhood not far from where the Szold family lived. During an early visit to Sowebo, Cooper spotted a child jumping on a mattress, which reminded her of the Street Play project. “It just looked right,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s the kind of neighborhood I want.’”

Against her real estate agent’s advice, she bought a house in Sowebo and started frequenting the neighborhood, often taking a Bolt bus from her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. Cooper figures she has taken well over 100,000 pictures in Sowebo. She acknowledges challenges—from rampant drug dealing to the amount of trash on the streets—but lauds residents for being “incredibly resilient and friendly. Every day, they transcend their circumstances.”

Cooper paired some of the Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in Soweto, South Africa, during a 2012 artist residency. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features virtually interchangeable scenes of block parties, children playing, storefronts, neighbors relaxing together, and even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts (Baltimore gave it a Best of Baltimore award in 2014). It showcases Cooper’s eye for detail, as well as her penchant to capture a sense of human resilience. Cooper hopes to eventually publish a book of Sowebo photos.

These days, Cooper rents out the Sowebo house and spends much of her time traveling to street art and graffiti festivals as a featured artist, honored guest, and/or official photographer. She photographed Germany’s notorious 1UP graffiti crew, which resulted in a new book, One Week with 1UP. Her popular Instagram feed (she currently has 195,000 followers) includes photos from recent trips to Sweden, Mexico, and Tahiti. It also includes pictures taken on the Fourth of July in Sowebo and at Dink’s compound.

While eating pizza at Zella’s, Cooper occasionally glances toward the street outside the restaurant’s large windows. It’s almost as if she’s afraid she might miss something by staying inside, or remaining stationary, for too long. Finally, she asks for a to-go box and packs up the remaining slices. “There’s an alley just a few blocks from here that I haven’t visited for a while,” she says. “It seems like there’s always something going on there.”

With that, Cooper grabs her camera bag and heads out the door.